Credit: TUC Library Collections at London Metropolitan University

Women are earning less than men in 97 percent of Congressional districts, the National Partnership for Women and Families has calculated. That means that only 13 members of Congress have the privilege of representing an area where women are out-earning or making equal pay to men.

Nationally, women make just 77 cents to a man’s dollar on average, but in some districts, that number is as low as 61 cents:

The gender pay gap manifests itself in several ways. Some dispute the top-line average, claiming that women make choices about the amount they work and the type of work they pursue, which limits their earning power. But these “choices” can also just be limiting factors enforced by an expectation that a woman should stay home to raise children, as well as discrimination that discourages women from pursuing particular career tracks. And that’s not to mention that men out-earn women even in the same exact job.

Mitt Romney last week dumped his 2011 tax return on Friday afternoon. They showed that he paid a 14.1 percent rate, which was actually several points higher than he would have owed had he taken advantage of all the deductions for which he qualified. Romney’s rate is lower than that of many middle class families, and lower even than large portions of the “47 percent” Romney derides.

Romney’s rate is so low because the lion’s share of his income comes from investments, which are taxed at the 15 percent capital gains rate, far below the top federal income tax rate of 35 percent. In an interview with 60 Minutes that aired Sunday night, Romney said it was “fair” that the capital gains tax rate is so low, because “I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth, to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.”

How much did this tax break save Romney exactly? $1.2 million last year alone, according to Citizens for Tax Justice:

First there was the Congressional hearing last Thursday, then the release of Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax return on Friday. While one of them was big news and the other not so much, both events highlight the biggest subsidy high-income taxpayers get from the tax system – the preferential rate on capital gains and dividends. While we tax “ordinary” income such as salary and wages at rates up to 35 percent, capital gains and dividends are never taxed higher than 15 percent. [...]

A CTJ review of Romney’s 2011 federal income tax return found that he saved $1.2 million in federal income taxes in 2011 because of the preferential capital gains tax rate. Without that special break, he would have paid total federal income taxes of $3.1 million and his tax rate would have been almost 23 percent.

The case for a low capital gains tax rate is dubious at best. And Romney himself made the case against a low capital gains rate, since he made his fortune via investments when the rate was much higher than it is today. As David Abromowitz explained at Bloomberg, “all of the investments made by Bain Capital LLC, the private-equity company Romney cofounded in 1984 and ran until 1999, occurred when capital-gains rates were much higher than they are today. Yet Bain consistently attracted massive amounts of private capital, and thrived.”

A shell company is a business with no actual employees or assets. It exists only on paper, as a purely legal artifact, and is sometimes what’s used when a company incorporates offshore.

Shell companies have their legitimate uses, such as addressing brand concerns. But their uses can also be less savory (such as tax avoidance) as well as blatantly illegal: fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and terrorism financing. And according to a new paper, opening a shell company in America and other rich nations is easier and subject to less scrutiny than anywhere else on the globe.

Corporate service providers (CSPs) register companies — including shell companies — around the world. The international rules laid down by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) require them to ensure authorities have “adequate, accurate, and timely” information on company ownership. The study, carried out by a professor and two assistant professors for Griffith University in Australia, contacted over 3,700 CSPs in 182 countries. The results, which The Economist flagged on Saturday, were not pretty:

Overall, 48% of the agents who replied failed to ask for proper identification; almost half of these did not want any documents at all. Contrary to conventional wisdom, providers in tax havens, such as Jersey and the Cayman Islands, were much more likely to comply with the standards than those from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Even poor countries had a better compliance rate, suggesting the problem in the rich world is not cost but unwillingness to follow the rules (see chart). Only ten out of 1,722 providers in America required notarised documents in line with the FATF standard.

The United States performed a bit better than OECD countries over all, a bit worse than developing countries, and all of them did much worse than the “tax haven” countries.

The study contacted CSPs using a standardized set of fake applicant profiles — some of these profiles were innocuous, but some were meant to raise red flags of either corruption or terrorism risks. According to the study’s authors, the reaction to the terrorism-risk applications was mixed, but the risk of corruption actually led to even less compliance with international standards. American CSPs refused less of the corruption-risk applicants , and internationally they made less effort to acquire proper documentation from them.

There were some meager bright spots. Some applications were worded in such a way to remind CSPs of non-compliance’s legal risks, and this seemed to inspire a meaningful uptick in compliance within the United States, suggesting a respect for the IRS’ authority. Offering to outright bribe service providers to not follow the rules was generally unsuccessful. Finally, the number of CSPs who simply didn’t respond at all to the study’s applications was quite high: 49 percent internationally and 77 percent in the United States.

While Republicans this year are claiming President Obama wants to balloon the size of government, reality tells a different story: not only has public sector employment fallen under the current administration, but Obama has succeeded in making significant cuts to wasteful contractor spending. Expenditures on independent contractors in the first half of 2012 dropped by 28 percent relative to the same period in 2010, the $13.1 billion dollars spent this year coming in well ahead of the Obama Administration’s target for cuts to contractor spending.

Contractors from large firms are often employed in place of standard federal employees, a process which costs the government a several billion dollar per year premium:

Federal contracts in 12 targeted consulting areas totaled $43 billion in fiscal 2010, with companies such as Lockheed Martin, Deloitte and Booz Allen Hamilton Holding among the biggest recipients of awards.

“Sometimes agencies are spending money on consultants to write reports that really don’t go anywhere — they sit on the shelf,” Jeff Zients, then-deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, said when he announced the goal. “Some of these contracts are unnecessary and can be reduced.”

Independent evidence backs up Deputy Director Zients’ assessment. A report by the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight (POGO) found that the government “pay[s] contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.” POGO researchers concluded that “the federal government is not doing a good job of obtaining genuine market prices, and therefore the savings often promised in connection with outsourcing services are not being realized.”

Indeed, the broader quest to outsource government functions to private entities seems to routinely end up costing states and the federal government significantly more money that it saves.

One federal contractor, Larry Allen of Allen Federal Business Partners, told Bloomberg Government that contracting profits would likely go up again in a Romney Administration, saying “You would have much more of a predisposition for outsourcing, and that could lead to an increase in service contracting.”

During a Sunday evening conference call with a group of Iowans, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney warned voters that President Obama wants to force everyone into organized unions. Twice during the 30 minute phone call, Romney raised the spectre of President Obama and Democrats reintroducing the Employee Free Choice Act, which was last introduced in 2009.

EFCA would have introduced “card check” votes in the workplace, making it easier for employees to decide whether or not to unionize. If 50 percent of workers sign a statement of support of organizing, that union would be granted bargaining power with the employer. The bill would strip employers of their ability to force their workers into a full union organizing election if they don’t like the results of a signature campaign.

As it stands, employers can legally force their workers to attend anti-union meetings and one-on-one “discussions” with their superiors ahead of any vote on unionization, an intimidation tactic that succeeds in derailing many unionization efforts. Stricter penalties for failure to negotiate a contract with a new union and for discriminating against any worker who supports a union would have also been included.

Even though EFCA never made it past the House in 2009, that didn’t stop Romney from ringing the alarm:

Romney brought up card check twice, unprompted, when answering Iowans’ questions about other topics. Early in the call, Romney mentioned it when describing his five-point plan for creating jobs.

“We’ve got to champion small business,” he said. “Small business is getting crushed under the president’s program with higher and higher regulation on small business, with higher taxes on small business, and by forcing people to join unions that don’t want to. That’s something known as card check. I think that’s a bad idea.”

But EFCA does not force anyone to do anything. It simply gives workers the ability to more easily organize themselves into a union if a majority of them choose to do so. One study found that “employers threatened to close plants in 57 percent of [union] campaigns and threatened to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent,” while firing pro-union workers 34 percent of the time.
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CEO pay has increased 725 percent over three decades, while worker pay has essentially remained flat. Corporations argue that the excessive compensation is necessary to retain top talent, but a new study blows a hole in this highly-improbable theory:

It is increasingly apparent that the pay awarded to chief executives is becoming profoundly detached from not just the pay of the average worker, but also from the companies they run. Offsetting the external focus, which is so heavily relied upon today, with internal metrics and internal benchmarking may help to curb the persistent escalation. We hope that if directors are no longer constrained by notions of “competitive” pay, which are driven by the false belief that CEOs are interchangeable, they may have the space to rationalize the upward spiraling pay ratchet and deliver what is more shareholder acceptable compensation.

Company boards rely on a practice where they use loosely defined “peer groups” of supposedly similar companies to set the CEO’s compensation. In reality, few CEOs leave one company for another: Of 1,800 CEO successions between 1993-2005, less than 2 percent had held the position at a competing firm. Their skills, highly specific to the company, are not easily transferrable.

Another issue is the “peer groups” companies use is so loosely defined that it includes firms that are much larger or aren’t in the same industry, much less rivals. In other words, the CEO of IBM is unlikely to jump to AT&T, Ford or Pfizer, even though those companies’ CEOs are included in IBM’s peer group.

A recent example may include Best Buy, which offered its new CEO a three-year compensation package of $32 million, after laying off 2,400 employees this summer. A company spokeswoman defended CEO Hubert Joly’s pay as “in-line with best practice for Fortune 50 companies,” and “is squarely in the mid-range for a CEO of a company the size of Best Buy.”

“It’s a false paradox,,” study co-author Elson told the New York Times. “The peer group is based on the theory of transferability of talent. But we found that C.E.O. skills are very firm-specific. C.E.O.’s don’t move very often, but when they do, they’re flops.”